Actually, it was you that remided me of that. Mark wasn’t even a party to this discussion at all and you had to go and pull hm in so you could make a cheap shot at his expense. Comparing him to ath soulless minion of orthodoxy Pike is just a little over the top.

Whatever, Mike. Despite your literary histrionics, the fact remains that that neither Pike nor Whittington have demonstrated any technical understanding of the subject. They are “experts” only because they proclaim themselves to be, frequently and loudly.

That you hate John and like Mark is quite irrelevant. They both turn in the same quality of work.

I’m not feeling it. It just doesn’t feel like the kind of bottom-up, sustainable program that will really help make humanity multiplanetary. Seems like, at best, another Apollo. Selling flags & footprints to the second-tier space powers.

[Golden Spike] aims to send paying passengers to the moon and back at an estimated price of $1.4 billion or more for two.

Of course we wish them well. They are targeting nations that want to be part of the lunar club without doing the work themselves at a lower cost than they could do themselves.

Of the 12 that have gone, how many have slept on the moon? It would be good for our species to increase that number.

How does this compare to other plans? Mars One plans to send four for $6b but that’s a one way trip compared to a round trip. So I’d say the cost for both plans are in line. Getting to orbit really is halfway to anywhere. But one gets you a new colony while the other doesn’t directly do that.

A colony requires many thing (not all just tech.) but mainly it requires enough people and a means of independence. I think that requires at least four dozen people (and the ability to birth more) so if this were a colony plan its cost for 48 would be… $34B.

Is Golden Spike too ambitious? In my opinion, they are not nearly ambitious enough. For $34b, I’d give you a good start on settlements throughout the solar system. The one on mars would be self sufficient the soonest, but with an annual budget of $1.7b (5% of $34b) I could fully supply 5 to 10 colonies from mercury to the asteroid belt.

Golden Spike isn’t interested in settlement. They’re a bunch of ex-NASA guys and politicians (Gingrich, Richardson). Government types. They’re just selling flags and footprints to the also-ran nations who can’t muster up the technical competence to do it themselves.

If Golden Spike has offered one word about ISRU, water mining, habitat building, or anything like that, I have not heard about it. And it could be great science too, seeing how crops might grow on lunar soil. But nope, no interest.

I agree. That is why I also think the prime nation they are targeting with this is the U.S.A. as a backdoor way to push for a lunar COTS.

But for any sustainable lunar architecture you need to start with the robots first, to prepare a site, process the fuel needed to refuel the lander (ISRU) and have a habitat ready so you may minimize the human lander.

Actually if you are smart the lander that delivers the robots and humans are one and the same with only different detachable modules placed on them, one to carry rovers, one for supplies and one for humans. Then you get to build up a track record landing the rovers and supplies before a human ever rides one.

> That is why I also think the prime nation they are targeting with this is the U.S.A. as a backdoor way to push for a lunar COTS.

I don’t see it that way. At least not in the way that I’m defining COTS. You have to deliver enough equipment to the lunar surface to mine ice. Their lander is just too small. Still, even they just got NASA to purchase a number of manned science missions to the lunar surface, it might create interest in what else those astronauts could do besides picking up yet more rocks. That might be fine for the national prestige of other countries, but for the United States, I’m thinking that they would only purchase manned flights if it was part of establishing a permanent base.